Oh God, that I were dead!”

During one of his October London readings at St James’s Hall to which I had gone without telling Dickens that I would be in attendance, I saw him begin the reading with his usual energy and with every appearance of personal delight at revisiting The Pickwick Papers—either a fact or an illusion that always delighted audiences—but within minutes he seemed to find it impossible to say “Pickwick.”

“Picksnick,” he called his character and then paused, almost laughed, and tried again. “Peckwicks… I apologise, ladies and gentlemen, I meant to say, of course… Picnic! That is, Packrits… Pecksniff… Pickstick!”

After several more such embarrassing tries, he stopped and looked down at his friends in the front seats reserved for them (I was far back in the balcony on this night), and showed something like amusement in his expression. But it was also a look of some small desperation, I thought, as if he were asking them for help.

And—even far back in the laughing, loving mob—I could all but smell his sudden rush of panic.

Through all these weeks, Dickens had been honing his reading script for Nancy’s Murder but had not used it. As he confided to me at Vérey’s, “I simply am afraid to read it, my dear Wilkie. I have no doubt that I could perfectly petrify an audience with it… with reading one-eighth of it!.. but whether the impression would be so horrible, so completely terrifying, as to keep them away from my readings another time, is what I cannot satisfy myself upon.”

“You shall know when you have sounded them out through a few more readings, my dear Charles,” I had said that night. “You shall know when the time is right. You always do.”

Dickens had simply acknowledged the compliment with a nod of his head and a distracted sip of wine.

Then I heard, through Dolby, that I was to be a special guest—along with a hundred and fifteen or so other “special guests”—at a private reading (it was during the campaign hiatus) at St James’s Hall on Saturday, 14 November.

Dickens was finally going to slaughter Nancy.

EARLY ON THE AFTERNOON of his reading, I went to Rochester. Mr Dradles met me in front of the cathedral and I went through my usual ritual of gift giving. The brandy that I was buying for this dusty old man was more expensive than that which I usually purchased for myself and special guests.

Dradles accepted it with a grunt and quickly tucked it away somewhere in his voluminous layers of thick canvas and flannel coats and moleskin and flannel waistcoats. He was so flannelly bulky and moleskin-and-canvas bulbous to begin with that I couldn’t even make out the bulge where the bottle had gone.

“Dradles says, this way, Guv’ner,” he said and led me back around the cathedral and tower to the crypt entrance. He was carrying a bullseye lantern with its cover down and set it down briefly as he patted himself for the proper key. The countless pockets on his person gave up countless keys and rings of keys before he found the right one.

“Watch yer ’ead, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins,” was all he said when he lifted the blindered lantern as we entered the dark labyrinth. The November day was overcast enough that almost no light filtered down through the glassless trapezoids fitted into the groined ceiling. Tree roots, shrubs, and in some places actual sod had covered over the spaces that had been meant by the long-dead cathedral builders as skylights for this necropolis. I followed him mostly by sound, finding my way by sliding my hand across the slick-slate stone. The rising damp.

TIP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TIP-TIP-TAP. Dradles seemed to have found an echo he liked. He unshrouded the lantern and showed me a joining of masonry where the corridor curved and followed narrow steps lower into the crypt.

“Does Mr Billy W. C. see?” he asked. His breath filled the cold space between us with rum fumes.

“It’s been taken down, newer stones set in place, and remortared,” I said. I had to work to keep my teeth from chattering. Caves are said to be warmer—with their constant temperature in the fifties or whatever—than the cold November wind outside this day. But not this crypt-cave.

“Aye, by Dradles ’imself not two year ago,” he breathed at me. “No one there is, not the rector, not the choirmaster, nor even ’nother mason, would notice—after a day or three—if the new mortar were newer. Not if Dradles done it.”

I nodded. “And this wall opens directly into a crypt?”

“Nay, nay,” laughed the flannelled mason. “Be two more walls ’tween us an’ the ol’ ’un. This ’ere wall opens just to the first space ’tween it an’ the older wall. Eighteen inches, at the most.”

“Enough?” I asked. I could not finish the sentence properly with “for a body?”

Dradles’s rheumy red eyes gleamed at me in the lantern light. He seemed very amused, but he also seemed to be reading my mind perfectly. “No’ for no body, no,” he said far too loudly. “But for mere bones, vertebrae, pelvis, ’tarsals, a watch or chain or gold teeth or two, an’ for a nice, clean, smiling skull… more ’n ’nough room, sir. More ’n ’nough room. The ol’ ’un farther in won’t begrudge the new lodger ’is space, nosir, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir.”

I felt my gorge rising. If I didn’t leave this place soon, I would be sick right across the headstone carver’s filthy undifferentiated boots. But I stayed long enough to ask, “Is this the same spot you and Mr Dickens chose for any bones he’s to bring?”

“Oh, no, sir. No, sir. Our Mr Charles Dickens, famous author, ’e chose a darker, deeper spot for the bones ’e’ll bring Dradles, right down them stairs there, sir. Would the Wilkie gen’mun like to see?”

I shook my head and—without waiting for the little lantern light to follow—fought my way up and out and into the air.

THAT EVENING, as I sat in St James’s Hall with about a hundred of Charles Dickens’s closest friends, I wondered how many times the Inimitable had stood on that stage and performed—either theatrically or as the first of a new breed of authors who read their works. Hundreds of times? At least. He was—or had been—that “new breed of authors.” And no one seemed to be equalling or replacing him.

This public Murder of Nancy would be yet another unprecedented departure for a man of letters.

Forster had told me that it was he who had convinced Dickens to ask the Chappells their opinion on this—to Forster’s mind—calamitous idea of including Nancy’s Murder in the reading programme. And it had been the Chappells who had suggested this private audience to test the reaction to such a grim and grisly reading.

Just prior to the performance, I overheard a very famous London physician (not our dear friend Beard) say to the Inimitable—“My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if only one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be contagion of hysteria all over the place.”

Dickens had only modestly lowered his head and given a smile that anyone who knew him would have classified as more wicked than mischievous.

Taking my place in the second row next to Percy Fitzgerald, I noticed that the stage was set a little differently than for Dickens’s usual readings. Besides his regular personalised frame of directed gas lighting and the violet-maroon screen that set him off to such advantage on a darkened stage, Dickens had added two flanking screens of the same dark colour and even similarly hued curtains behind them, the effect of which was to narrow and focus the wide stage to the tiny, dramatically lighted space immediately surrounding him.

I admit that I had expected Dickens to open the reading with something less sensational—probably an abbreviated version of his perennial and always popular Trial Scene from The Pickwick Papers (“Calling Sam Weller!”)—so as to lead up to the Sturm und Drang of Nancy’s Murder and to give us all a sense of how the sensationalist finale would be somewhat ameliorated by the other readings in a full evening’s presentation.